Has the World XC had its day?
African dominance is to be checked - through administration
A report in this week’s Athletics Weekly says that the IAAF will create a bi-annual staging of the World Cross-Country Championships due to the of dominance from east Africa, coupled with a fall in sponsorship revenues and dropping European TV audiences.
Of course the World Cross has been a source of continued disappointment for the majority of Europe in the last 25 years, with us having to look back to Portuguese great Carlos Lopes for the last non-African win in 1985.
IAAF council member Isaiah Kiplagat said:
The future of the world cross-country championship is currently not certain because no country is willing to host the event and it is lacking sponsorship. Next year’s event set for Bydgoszcz, Poland, will go on as planned but after that, the event will be held after a span of two years
Pierre Weiss, the IAAF’s general secretary, suggested that there were two options for 2011, one of which was Australia.
In his Athletics Weekly’s article Steven Downes says:
Recently, few European nations have even bothered entering full teams across all events. The last time a runner representing a non-African nation won the senior men’s race was 2001 when Belgium claimed the honour through Moroccan-born Mohammed Mourhit.
The African stranglehold has eroded European television coverage of the event and so deterred sponsors. The IAAF only took on the event in 1973 from the International Cross Country Union, which had been staging its races annually, except during world wars, since 1903.
It will be pretty clear to regular readers of MST that we think there is another ingredient in this mix too – that of falling standards. America aside, it can be safely said that non-African endurance standards have dropped dramatically since the times of Lopes et al, and this has coincided with the continued ramping of standards in African long-distance running.
So, its has come to a head and we cant help thinking that the latest ‘solution’ is a sticking plaster!
